Hank wrote:In your post 77 years of Batman comics: The second image from the left of Batman kissing Catwoman and the image of Batman clenching his fist on the gargoyle (titled Batman A Celebration of 75 years) in your post were originally drawn by Jim Lee as part of the promotions for Hush. Hush was another special moment for me... so its hard to look at objectively in some ways... Jim Lee was one of the artists that inspired me when I was young. I collected all of the variant covers for X-Men #1 that he drew and used to lay them out on the floor to see them combine to on large image. I followed all of his work. If he drew it, I owned it. I went with him over to Image when he co-founded the company and created WildC.A.T.s . So, when he teamed up with Jeph Loeb, the guy who wrote the Batman book that got me into Batman... well... I was beside myself. Hush is pretty famous for having a modern day Batman v. Superman arch in it. I would let you borrow my Absolute Edition of it, if you lived a little closer.

I didn't know anyone had made variant covers that would become a mosaic of a larger image!

X-Men and JLA are among my laugh-at comic series, mainly because it occurred to me when I was a teenager grooving on the JLA comics in Johnny's collection, that they never met any super villain that they had no JLA member to defeat. There was always someone in the gang who had just the right power or skill needed to overcome...anyone.

That hasn't stopped me from seeing all the X-Men films, though. I saw one Avengers film. But I haven't seen any of the animated JLA movies.

Actually, realizing that about the JLA didn't stop me from reading the JLA comics, either. Until we moved to Memphis. After 1967 I don't think I read any comic books for over 30 years. And then Supes died, and I had to buy the TPB of the collected stories. Got back into comic books after that, but not really as a collector. There are too many that I'd want to own, and that would tie up too much of my limited financial assets, plus I don't have anywhere to store the physical items. (sigh)

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

THE Long Halloween is in my possession now. And I've got Dark Victory in hand. Actually, I already began reading Dark Victory when I picked it up because I had already learned several months ago who the killer is in Long Halloween, on the BatWiki or someplace.

AND I'll decide whether to buy Hush as a Kindle edition before I read the Hush sequels.

ALSO, I watched Batman Forever for the first time last night and this afternoon (ha ha, not twice, merely a split viewing). Man, William Dozier has nothing on the campiness of Mr. Schumacher!

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

The Art Director, called Production Designer in modern times, is the person who creates the look of the film at the behest of the Director. The Costume Designer draws out costumes, and then supervises the creation of the clothing worn by cast members and extras.

Batman (1943) set design by someone
No name is credited for "Set Decoration" or "Art Direction" or "Production design." Can't find any name associated with that task by Googling. Whoever worked so hard on sets and costumes and the look of the film is lost to history. Perhaps standard sets were used, maybe all on the back lots of the studio. Perhaps there was location scouting and shooting. Of course the interiors were all on sound stages. But who made the costumes? And who selected the set dressing?

Batman (1966) art direction by Serge Krizman and Jack Martin Smith
Both Krizman and Smith have credits for Art Direction on both the 1966 Batman the Movie release and on the TV show for all 120 episodes. There is no particular credit for costumes listed for this film.

Serge Krizman worked in Art Direction from 1953 (The Glass Wall) until 1987 (Cracked Up, and the series Hotel, both for TV). His total title credits at IMDb are 46, but many of these represent dozens of episodes on television series. His work ranged across genres, but he had a lot of experience with Westerns.

Jack Martin Smith had a career that started in 1944 with Broadway Rhythm, and ended in 1989 with the Dynasty TV series, three years before his death. A total of 165 credits at the end. Smith was popular enough with his Hollywood peers that they nominated him 9 times for Oscars, and gave him an Oscar on three occasions, for Cleopatra (1963), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Hello Dolly! (1969). Smith spent much of his career forging the on-screen appearance of television programs, while still directing art for feature films.

Terry Ackland-Snow has 9 production design credits listed at IMDb. His 17 Art Director credits include this film. In 1950 he started as a draughtsman trainee on The Fighting Pimpernel. In 1975 he was named Art Director for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His Production Designer credits are mostly for British television series. His most recent credit at IMDb is for Planet Cook (2004) where is is listed as a Constructor. His feature film work includes Superman II (1980), The Dark Crystal (1982), Labyrinth (1986) and Get Real (1998).

Nigel Phelps also started as a draughtsman on The Company of Wolves (1984). He became Art Director for Wish You Were Here (1987) and Production Designer in 1995 for Judge Dredd. To date all his work has been for feature films, including a single made-for-TV movie. He is credited with Production Design on the 2017 Pirates of the Caribbean release. Some of his credited work that I have seen: Judge Dredd (1995), Troy (2004) and World War Z (2013).

Leslie Tompkins began as an uncredited draughtsman for Carry on Loving (1970). His first stint as Art Director was for The Shining (1980). This led him into a career designing the look of very high profile films that lasted through 2015 (and may still be in motion, just not with any evidence at our movie database website). I adjure you to review the listing of his projects at the data base.

Bob Ringwood has been designing costumes for features since 1981's Excalibur. He has figured in this thread for The Time Machine (2002). He has garnered 21 Costume Designer credits through 2004.

Tony Dunsterville is listed for costume design as uncredited on only one film. Guess which one. But he also worked on 10 titles in the Special Effects area. He was a model maker on Superman (1978). His latest IMDb credit is for An American Werewolf in Paris (1997).

Batman Begins (2005) production design by Nathan Crowley
Given that the two prior Batman films had duos in charge of the look of the movies, it seems odd that this larger-scale show would need only one man. But Nathan Crowley has sole credit for Production Design. There are nine names listed for Art Direction, though, with Simon Lamont getting credit as Supervising Art Director. Costumes design is by Lindy Hemming.

Nathan Crowley was a junior set designer on Hook (1991) to kick off a career that has produced 16 Production Designer credits, 6 Art Department credits and five credits as Art Director. He has helmed production design six times for Chris Nolan. Three times his name has been entered into Oscar nomination. His latest project is Westworld, a TV series that is in post-production. Crowley is responsible for the excellent look of John Carter (2012), which did not contribute to its box office failure. He was the set designer for Escape from L.A. (1996). Art Direction credits include Braveheart (1995) and Mission: Impossible II (2000).

Simon Lamont's first Art Director credit was for a video project entitled Shadow Chaser (1992). Lamont set the look for Event Horizon (1997), Hellboy (2004), Casino Royale (2006) as well as the first and second Nolan Batman films.

Lindy Hemming designed costumes for Satan's Children (1975) to get started. Her latest credit listing at IMDb is for Paddington (2014), her 48th. She did the costume design for all three Nolan Bat-films, and has three James Bonders with Pierce Brosnan, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) among her four dozen projects so far.

As always, if you are interested in who actually makes these films we all watch you should go to IMDb, select any movie you desire, and click on the Full Cast and Credits link to learn who is truly responsible for you getting to see that movie; many people other than the man or woman whose name comes after "Director" in the credits.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Special effects are anything from dummies, to practical explosions on set, to CGI compositing. In other words, whatever is not ordinary action that is being filmed. Stunts are a category of special effects. All special effects have to be co-ordinated in some way. Stunts have to be carefully planned, and choreographed so that every individual thing is in the right place at the right time--and that includes the people. The end result should look real. Films about costumed super-heroes require more in the way of special effects than an episode of I Love Lucy would. In some cases, the names of those who created these special visual effects are lost to history. In other cases there are dozens of names that glide past the eyes of anyone who decides to watch the credits roll.

Batman (1943) stunts by George Robotham
In my research on the 1943 Batman movie serial I ran across the name of only one stunt person: George Robotham, the stunt double for Doug Croft, who plays Robin. I cannot even be sure the identification is correct. But IMDb lists him uncredited for stunts, and also uncredited for playing a Henchman.

Robotham was born in 1921, so he was 22 years old when he doubled for 16-year old Douglas Croft. As I pointed out in one of the reviews and an essay, you can easily see the difference in muscularity between Croft's bare legs and Robotham's. IMDb says that Robotham played football at UCLA. Thus, the more powerful legs, no doubt.

Robotham has 89 credits for stunt work, and 62 credits for acting in small parts. Robotham's first screen appearance was as Robin's stunt double and the Henchman in 1943. It's interesting that Robotham returned to the screen as Robin's double in 1949 in the Batman and Robin movie serial. Apparently, George Robotham didn't receive screen credit for stunt work until 1957 in the TV series Richard Diamond, Private Detective. For acting, he was first credited in Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), as Earl, the TV Truck Cameraman-driver.

Why am I devoting so much space to this one man? Because in those early movie serials very few people were credited. And I think he deserves the notice. In fact, Robotham was working for the money more than anything else until he became the stunt coordinator for three episodes of Wonder Woman (1977-1978). If you ever saw The Goonies (1985) you saw the results of his work as stunt coordinator. His last credited work was for stunts in Bedazzled (2000).

By 1966 there was still no compositing beyond some kind of optical compositing. Computers could not handle graphical material at that time, at lest not with the swiftness and transparency that they can today.Batman (1966) special effects by Johnny Borgese
This man has 63 credits for special effects beginning with Adventure in Dairyland, episode "Off to Wisconsin" (1956). Next he did special effects on 125 episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club from 1955-1958. Borgese was the man behind the special effects in many Irwin Allen TV shows that I saw as a kid. But he also did feature films such as The Great Race (1965), Camelot (1967), Doctor Doolittle (1967), Planet of the Apes (1968), Jaws (1975), Demolition Man (1993), many others. Most of his work was for television, ending with Sirens (1994-1995), and much of it was uncredited on the screen. Of interest: Borgese did the special effects for the 1966 Batman theatrical feature, but didn't work on the TV series. He was probably tied up being special effects supervisor for the Lost in Space TV series from 1965-1968.

Even in 1989 computers could not provide useful graphics. Nearly all the effects you see in Tim Burton's movie are practical effects: something was done with real objects, whether life-sized or miniatures, and the result was cut into the finished movie.Batman (1989) special effects by a crew of 22 people
Eighteen of these people have the word "technician" in their credit lines. That means they were the ones making the stuff happen! To see who they are, and to trace them through their careers, follow the Full Cast & Crew link for the 1989 film below.

Just some names picked at random: Steve Crawley was the wire effects technician. (38 credits from 1984 to 2012)

John Evans was the special effects supervisor. (38 credits from 1974 to 2005)

Claire Flewin has an uncredited acknowledgment on IMDb as "fabricator." (11 special effects credits from 1989 for this film to 2015; 13 costume credits from 1993 to 2015; and one art department credit from 1989 for the TV series Press Gang.)

Digby Milner is one of 8 special effects technicians on Batman. (23 special effects credits from Star Wars: Episode V (1980) through 2012; 4 visual effects credits from 1984-1999.)

By 2005 there were shiploads of people working on all kinds of special effects, both practical and computer-generated/enhanced.Batman Begins (2005) special effects by several crews of people.
There are hundreds of names. Literally hundreds in the categories Special Effects by, Visual Effects by, and Stunts.

Too many are represented for me to pick out just a few names. You can do that, though with the link to the Full Cast and Crew below. It seems like a cop-out for me to just write this and leave it at that, but it takes so many hands and brains to pull together a modern film. People get credits for carrying coffee, nowadays. In 1943 the people doing stunts, building sets, customizing vehicles, setting lights, weren't considered important enough to waste screen time showing their names. Besides, they weren't freelancers back then; they worked for the studios.
If you are one of the readers here who has some involvement in the arts, you are well aware that a lot of time is spent creating something, and it takes only a short while to look at, read, listen to, or walk by without looking up, after the work is done. An analogue is the amount of time it takes to rig (or reset) an explosive practical effect (flipping over a truck, anyone, from the next Nolan film?) compared to how long the explosion takes in real life, or even when its over-cranked for slow motion on screen. Model makers, data wranglers, roto artists, stunt drivers, fight consultants, miniature artists. Sometimes I don't even bother reading the names on the screen, they fly by so rapidly. Some of your names are among those speeding strings of letters.

Hats off to the uncredited and unsung who work just as hard for a lot less money than the rich, top-billed mooks. Yeah, if those people could be doing the special effects work, they'd be doing it. But they're not. So they're mooks when it comes to SFX.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

I spent 131 days plowing through it. Could have written several more essays. Batman is a huge topic, larger even than Godzilla. My usual practice of reviewing the background material was for nought in this case. How could I read 77 years' worth of comics?! I still have three volumes that I'm working through. I love reading Batman comic books, even at my advanced age. But, as they always have, they irritate me a little. Some stories make me feel the way I did as an 8-15 year-old boy when I read them. Others make me feel as if I am an alien arriving on earth with no prior knowledge of culture.

In a day or two or five or ten I will post possible next Rematches, and see if anyone has a preference. All these will be strictly between one film and another film. Might be a regular Rematch, or an NQRR type.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Possible next Rematch idea would come from these top four pairs. For three of them I've already pulled automatic frame grabs using VLC. The third (On the Beach) occurred to me as I watched These Final Hours last weekend. But I have all the movies at hand. At least one of them is not available for sale at the moment:

SKN: Victim (2010)/The Skin I Live In (2011) NQRR

BIC: Bicycle Thieves (1948)/Beijing Bicycle (2001) NQRR

BCH: On the Beach (1959)/These Final Hours (2013) NQRR

PAI: Pinocchio (1996)/Artificial Intelligence (2001) NQRR

All these ideas are fetching. I'm not certain which is the most compelling for me. I think I might start one of these in September. Probably the top one up there has high interest for me.

If you have a preference post it in here. If no one expresses interest in any one of the first four, then I'm still on my own! There used to be discussion in the thread for the first two years or so. I think everyone else is more tired of this idea than I am. But I'm still enjoying it, and get several thousand page views for each Rematch (87,496 during the Batman Multimatch, for example), so the lurkers are tempting me to continue.

Pending, possible ideas, but I'm not up to tackling them yet:

BRN: Tom Brown's Schooldays (1940, 1951, 1971, 2005) Multimatch.

Actually, I'm kind of imagining a Flashmatch, like I did with Scum for this one. There are other film examples, and, of course, a novel. The last two films are a TV miniseries and a recent made-for TV movie.

This is another one that would be long and exhausting. I've watched a lot of Tarzan films, and I've read two of the novels. This will involve comparisons of these films, but quick notes about a dozen others.

Own the DVDs of all these, and Dead End Kids. Would have to pull stills. I believe it would be only my second all B&W film Rematch yet (The Maltese Falcon was 3 B&W movies). This is an NQ matchup because the middle film is merely based on the first one, the third is a fairly close remake of the first one. And the second and third both feature the Dead End kids as the younguns.

BRH: Battle Royale (2000)/The Hunger Games (2012) NQRR.

Yes, there are sequels. No, they won't be featured.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

I enjoyed The Skin I Live In tremendously when I saw it. I will have to look into it's counterpart...

Likewise I will have to look into the counterparts to all those films; I own Bicycle Thieves but haven't seen Beijing Bicycle as well as having seen A.I. (just within the past year, actually) but not that version of Pinocchio. And as luck would have it, These Final Hours is in my queue on de 'Flix with an estimated 4.75 stars for little ol me... yet I had never heard of On the Beach.

Anyway, I tend to lean toward being most interested in the first matchup you listed... but all are interesting to me in someway.

As far as I know you can't buy Victim right now. There is a YouTube post, with spoken Russian instead of subtitles. Not very good if you don't understand Russian. You can't understand the English with the Russian spoken on top of it. The same posting used to have Russian subtitles.

It isn't streaming on Flix right now. Amazon doesn't have it, not even to stream. I guess if you know some bittorrent sites you might get a copy. The only DVD I find for sale is PAL format from Oz, and they are waiting for restock from their suppliers.

And, as you know from having seen The Skin I Live In, nearly everything in the reviews and essays will have to be behind spoiler tags! This is one of the very very few films where there are true spoilers.

There are not enough reviews at Rottentomatoes to yield a Tomatometer score, for Victim (2010) but the 368 user ratings average to 67% favorable.

You should be able to find the rest in various formats, and readily available. Beijing Bicycle is available again as a DVD.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Last night we got back from our family vacation of 10 days in Wisconsin. Today I am watching movies and doing laundry. There's a lot to do for 4 kids. This relates to this thread because I have now viewed These Final Hours. I'm interested to see how a film from 1959 handled a similar story. Ok, back to folding...

I can take that as one vote for the Victim/Skin NQRR and one vote against it.

Or one vote for Victim/Skin and one for Beach/Hours. But I'm not sure what to do. They come from the same person, the only voter so far!

You and YTMN and I might be the only Corries still reading this thread, dude.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Quite-Gone Genie wrote:It always seems like I've seen only one half of most of these rematches; usually the original.

That's been my theme too... always having seen half of the match up. I'm trying to fix that with the upcoming ones with my acquisition of On the Beach and the addition of Battle Royale to my queue on Netflix instant. That will make two NQRR sets that I've seen both.

I'm sure you already know this, Hank, but Battle Royale is not something you'll want any of your kids to watch. Just sayin.

When I read the The Hunger Games novels I could not believe that the author had never heard of Battle Royale...but she claims not to have.

My only reluctance with choosing Victim/Skin I Live In is that you don't have any way to see Victim. Unless you have access to torrents. That's the only option anyone has right now, it seems.

So I'm leaning towards Beach/Hours as the next one. I love all these ideas and would like to start them all...but I learned in Round One that it's not a good idea to have eight matches running at the same time. And I learned in Rounds Two and Three that I don't really like having this scheduled out two years in advance because I feel as if I have to stay with the schedule, more or less.

So picking one and finishing it at a leisurely pace...that might be more my speed. Hope it's your speed, too, all of you. (I felt like Batman took too long to finish.)

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Well, with me adding On the Beach to the trends, it is the number one trending title on the corrie with 3 views. Perhaps you didn't add it twice and truly three people have viewed it recently! I have now seen both films in that match. We'll see if I get to Battle Royale today, I have off school but my children do not.

Hank wrote:Well, with me adding On the Beach to the trends, it is the number one trending title on the corrie with 3 views. Perhaps you didn't add it twice and truly three people have viewed it recently! I have now seen both films in that match. We'll see if I get to Battle Royale today, I have off school but my children do not.

I got the Kindle edition of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, and I'm reading it. Actually, none of the Corrie Trends entries for OTB is mine. I've seen it only once, the year the DVD came out.

Just knowing that one other person besides me has seen both films helped me choose Beach/Hours as the likely next Rematch. I've started writing essays and the like. Although, truthfully, I have essays/reviews written or in progress for nearly all those prospectives.

I'm really hepped about the Victim and Skin I Live In match, and bought the print novel (Tarantula, in English) for that one. But y'all can't see Victim very easily, so that ... well it unsells it for me at the moment.

And the first disc of the 1971 Tom Brown's School Days DVD set is on its way to me. Das' idea of the 3 movies starting with The Tingler also is fetching for me. But when it comes along I want him to return and help me write it. Haha. No that's not a sarcastic laugh like he won't be here, it's a "that would please me very much" kind of laugh.

Most of the work I get paid for isn't as complex (or fun) as doing this crap!

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

The Find-It post for the next Rematch will be up in a few days. Perhaps as early as Labor Day, but I have some family visiting to orchestrate tomorrow.

I'm planning on giving y'all until 28 September to watch or read or whatever you plan to do in order to be ready.

The initial post for the NQRR is ready to go. Next post.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

This is the initial post for The Not Quite a Remake Rematch between On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)

This NQ Rematch is complete as of 9 Dec 2015.

Suggested by YouTookMyName. Selected by Hank.

From the 1959 film Review: "If you thought the Batman Multimatch was dark, this one will beat it. For sure.
Batman was trying to stop the world from ending in a sense.
But these two films are about the end of human life on earth. Pure and simple, without candy-coating.
So what that means is that this is (like in the Scum Flashmatch) a very heavy pair of movies."

Essays for the NQR Rematch of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)

Go back using these buttons.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

I'll give those who want to have seen the films I write about time to do so. I put in the IP that I'll start at the end of the month.

Did get the Find it post ready today, so you'll have some links. Also, and I'm not sure if I discovered this years ago and it slipped my mind, but there is a TV mini-series of On the Beach produced in Australia (2000) that is based on both the Nevil Shute novel and the script used for the 1959 release. I'll definitely watch that and feature it in one of the essays. Perhaps Trip saw it? Liked it? Hated it? And perhaps he will let us know when the time comes.

Anyway, I rediscovered it today when I was building the Find it post.

I wonder if my son who now lives in Barcelona has a lot of Spanish holidays. I'm sure they don't observe US Labor Day! Ha ha.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

2002 DVD:On the Beach (2000) at Amazon.com. I discovered this Australian television mini-series as I was building the Find it post for the Rematch. There is a link to the first part of a 20-part YouTube upload of this version, below. The 2005 Region 1 DVD release is out of print and is, thus, rather expensive. Used copies are as little as about $15.00 plus shipping, in September 2015. Based on both Shute's novel and the John Paxton screenplay, plus a lot of embellishment from the novel that has been updated to the turn of the century, and some re-plotting.

Soundtracks1959 Soundtrackon the beach 1959 soundtrack Google search result.
If you search for the 1959 soundtrack you may find ebay or amazon marketplace offers of the original vinyl LP. On the day I searched I found two offers at Amazon Marketplace, for $39.99 each, plus shipping.2013 Soundtrackthese final hours soundtrack Google search result. Apparently the cuts are available from iTunes.

YouTube Google search results -- YouTube on the beach 1959.On the Beach (2000). An Australian television production posted in 20 parts on YouTube. The post was made to YouTube in 2007, so it might hang around a while. At least until you watch it if you wish. I'll discuss this version in an essay. It is 3 h 29 m long. The audio sync goes several seconds off early in segment 19. All the other segments seem to be okay.YouTube Google search results -- YouTube these final hours.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Intentions were good. Intentions were to have something posted by now. But have had to work an extra 8 hours per week of English as a Second Language tutoring into my schedule, and it leaves less time for writing essays, pulling stills, and composing boring graphics.

Might get something up this coming weekend.

I think my YTMN hat got kicked beneath the couch or something.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Keep running across additional "end of the world as we know it" films that want to be considered in the essay about them.

Must either ditch the essay (which will cut down on my film-watching time related to the Rematch by a lot), or I've got a lot of films to look through!

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

If you thought the Batman Multimatch was dark, this one will beat it. For sure. Batman was trying to stop the world from ending, in a sense. But these two films are about the end of human life on earth. Pure and simple, without candy-coating. So what that means is that this is (as with the three films in the Scum Flashmatch) a very heavy pair of movies.

I was only 5 when the book On the Beach was published, and only 7 when the film was released. I could have read the novel when I was in High School, and many of the English teachers put it on their suggested reading list, but there was a lot of Cold War paranoia about, and I was already terrified enough of a nuclear holocaust without reading a decade-old novel where everyone perishes because of one. I took a pass.

But I could not see the film. There were no outlets other than broadcast or theatrical re-release for you to see movies. The high school English teacher in charge of the Kingsbury High School Film Society tried to get a 16mm print of it to show, but without success. And I can't imagine a TV executive programming such a film and trying to sell commercials in those days. As late as 1983 ABC TV broadcast The Day After, and no company wanted to buy any of the commercial spots after the point in the story where the bombs fall. So most of the show was broadcast without commercial breaks. ABC bravely aired the program, anyway. In that case not everybody dies, nor is it suggested that all humans are going to die as a result of the nuclear war. Also, The Day After is in color. On the Beach is black and white.

Then, as a 40-something I got curious about the film, and blind-bought a DVD of it on sale at Best Buy 15 years ago. I watched the film a single time, and then put the box on my DVD rack. My second viewing was for this Rematch. I bought the novel and read it for the first time for this Rematch.

The idea for this NQRR arose when I watched the other film just this summer: These Final Hours (2013), also set in Australia. Something within urged me to explore how the two films are alike and how they differ. So here it is.

One of my English teachers while attempting to get us to select On the Beach for an extra reading assignment, told us that at the end it holds out absolutely no hope. Well, if I had been predisposed to read it, at that moment my willingness died a harsh death. But Stanley Kramer had to deal with this when making his film.

Reportedly, Kramer was a social activist, which might have led to his decision to make this film. To get the message of warning out, if he could. We were all uptight about the possibility that the film depicts, adults and kids alike. I have never spoken to anyone my age who said that he or she never managed to get the concern out of mind, but all agree that it wouldn't entirely go away. I believe we thought about it when we weren't "thinking about it" and that led to subliminal stress. It might have led to the rise of the Hippie movement: a reaction mechanism for something that we truly could not do anything about, that threatened to arrive at any moment, "With warning. With no warning," to completely delete the possibilities that we dreamed of.

And, yes, they made us watch Duck and Cover in elementary school. And, yes, we did drills in the hallway and cafeteria and in our classrooms. Once in a creepy coincidence we had a school-wide fire drill at noon on the day the "air raid sirens" were tested. When they went off that day, with their blood-curdling moaning sounds, we were standing on the field outside the school, and I wonder how many of us kids, only a few miles away from the nation's major Strategic Air Command base had dreadful images of incoming Soviet ballistic missiles in our heads.

The film is set five years into the future (1964 for the 1959 release), so it's far enough away to not really be "now," but close enough that it seems creepily soon.

Here are some aspects of the film and whether I like them or don't care for them:

Like: Given that On the Beach is a movie about the fictional, but literal end of the human world Stanley Kramer must be applauded for not conjuring up some "out" for the world on the screen. He actually kills off everyone. I bought the DVD mainly to see if he actually did that. Yet, the last shot provides a kind of ersatz Hollywood ending. That very last shot of the film, no matter how heavy-handed the things that have come before might be, no matter how heavy-handed the music over the last shot...it's just so cool with irony, that it's quite clever. And, despite the proclamation of my once English teacher, it does hold out hope ... for the viewer. You'll understand what I mean if you give it a watch. That is, the whole movie, not simply the final shot.

Like: The film portrays the lingering sense of morality that accompanies a sudden loss of spouse or any other loved one. Especially if you are absent to the actual loss. He/she is still alive in your head and heart. It is difficult to grasp death in absentia. I think the film makes an attempt at examining that idea, but the novel does it quite well.Don't Like: A change in plot made in the film concerning Dwight and Moira is too Hollywood. In the novel Dwight Tower holds onto his commitment in marriage to his wife. He knows she is dead, but she lives in his heart. As corny as that sounds, it is actually one of the stronger threads of the novel. Only two years passed between publication and film release, so it wasn't a passage of time or a change of mores that led the filmmakers to allow Dwight and Moira to have a sexual fling. In the novel Dwight goes only so far as to kiss Moira. She admits that she is chasing him, but tells Mary that she won't catch him.

Like: Giuseppe Rotunno's lighting schemes and the photographic compositions make the film visually rich. The lack of color makes the characterizations and the themes matter. There is, of course, a lot of talking in this movie. The photography helps make it seem less drawing room.

Like: A few years after helming production of On the Beach, Stanley Kramer directed one of the funniest and most bizarre comedies I have ever seen: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. His range as a director is amazing. And he didn't strip away all the potentially humorous moments from On the Beach. In fact, there is a great deal of natural humor in the film. Come to think of it, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is as fatalistic in its own, silly way as the nuclear war film is.

Don't Like: Okay, it's a product of its times. The 1950s were a moralizing time. So this is a moralizing film. It not only intends to stimulate you to think about some issues you might normally avoid, but it wants you to reach a certain conclusion when you get done thinking.Like: Having written that, I'm not so certain that my sense that the film is trying to tell me what I should think, is entirely correct. I might be wrong. It's difficult to tell about films of this time. What would have appeared very open-ended at the time might come across as didactic now. But it might have seemed scandalously relativistic in the day.

Don't Like: These people just go on as usual following the nuclear war. For months. Sure, the war was a world away. For two years! Meanwhile, the radiation approaches at a frustratingly slow pace. Could anyone really do that? In the novel, they continually make adjustments as the radioactive fallout grows near. A few are shown to be worried in the movie (Mary Peters, for example won't allow anyone to talk about the inevitable, but that is largely true in the novel). But most "just carry on." Maybe this is a British thing, or something that was thought to be back in the day. I can't lay this cinematic misfire at the feet of Paxton or Kramer, though. Nevil Shute is known for writing books about characters who keep their emotions low-key. That aspect is present, but less obvious in the novel, because we are inside the minds of the characters. We know that they think about the dark side of the situation, but they rarely share it with others. When we stand outside them, as in the movie, it seems less authentic.

Don't Like: Another change from the novel galls me a bit. The characters in the novel are much younger, by at least ten years, and in one case forty years younger than their screen counterparts. In one of the essays I explain that Shute probably chose those ages for a reason, to make his major characters young when they face the end of humankind. The filmmakers go for box office, of course, and the capable players chosen are older. Some might find a bit of irony in 60-year old Dr. Julian Osborne doing many of the things that the late 20-something Dr. John Osborne of the novel does. But I just find it dumb. Not that Fred Astaire isn't good in the part he plays.

The last point actually became fodder for one of the essays in this Rematch.

I am simply not going to be able to tell you whether either of these films is "good" or not. I find them both enchanting because they show me something I am unlikely ever to experience, and in doing so they naturally whip up my intellectual fervor to speculate what I think I would do if I were in similar circumstances. Which I know I will never be. So it's all safe. And I probably wouldn't act the way I think I would. At least not entirely.

On the Beach preserves many of the humorous characters from Shute's novel. There is the old fellow at the men's club who is concerned that there are so many bottles of excellent port wine left to consume, and that there may not be enough time to drink it all. John Osborne (Julian in the film) gives into his obsession with racing, so much so that he buys a Ferrari from a local widow, and races it in the final Australian Grand Prix of 1964.

If you hate didactic movies, then the 1959 film isn't going to be one of your favorites. If you recognize that even a didactic film cannot tell you what to do (at most it can make suggestions), then you can treat it as any other fiction film. This is one guy's idea of what would happen and what it might mean to someone like you. Any uneasiness you have might be due to internal confusion, which is understandable. We don't often address these questions because...we will never ever have to in real life. Probably.

But we will all have to face the end of life. And it may not be by a piano falling on us as we stroll unawares down the boulevard. We may have a long while to contemplate the finality of some type of cancer. That would be similar to hearing radio reports of how close a radioactive cloud has come, and wondering if it will really come all the way to us. As always, the end would be far away, and would seem far away until it was right there. And then, there would be no avoiding it. If you take the film as a metaphor for that experience, then (except for those of us who die by way of plummeting musical instruments, or similar events) we will face what these characters face.

On the Beach (1959 film). From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "On the Beach is a 1959 American post-apocalyptic science fiction drama film from United Artists, produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins."

Stanley Kramer. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "Despite mixed critical reception, both then and now, the film industry heavily promoted Kramer's work with numerous awards. His films received 16 Academy Awards and 80 nominations, and he was nominated nine times as either producer or director."

The Day After. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "The Day After is an American television film that first aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. It was seen by more than 100 million people during its initial broadcast[1] is currently the highest-rated television film in history." I honestly think that the discussion group after the film might have had something to do with the end of the Cold War, at least with the US acceptance of glasnost in the moribund Soviet Union.

Duck and Cover Redux: Bulletproof Blankets for Kids. From Reading the Pictures. "When “the Bodyguard” is actual [sic] worn, these things also remind me of a kimono. But that photo of the children on the floor makes me think about how children of the ’50’s, when there [sic] class day wasn’t disturbed by an attack drill, might have been otherwise unconcerned at school, and even feeling relatively unburdened walking to and from."

15.jpg Image source. From Atom Anxious America. Caption reads, "A Californian schoolboy obeys the signal to 'Drop.' But he was just buying an ice-cream, and goes on eating, though it is against the rules."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

These Final Hours (2013) was better the second time through. So was On the Beach, actually.

This happens to me fairly often if I give films a second chance. There are notable exceptions, but they are small in number.

Does anyone else have that experience with some/many films? Or is it just me?

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Gort wrote:These Final Hours (2013) was better the second time through. So was On the Beach, actually.

This happens to me fairly often if I give films a second chance. There are notable exceptions, but they are small in number.

Does anyone else have that experience with some/many films? Or is it just me?

I'd say it's about the same for me on how a second viewing will affect my opinion... mainly because if I'm giving a film a second shot, it's because I enjoyed it to begin with. If I end up not liking a film on second viewing as much it is probably because I felt like I should have liked it but didn't on the first viewing. For instance, I might reflect on it thinking 'maybe I wasn't in the right mood the first time.' but then I end up sitting there at the end of the 2nd viewing going 'Nope. Just didn't like it. Hm.'

Probably most notably, I've done this with Saving Private Ryan. The direction, performances and subject are all of interest to me... but I just don't care for it in the end. Every couple years I watch it again because I keep thinking that I've got to be remembering something wrong. So many people like it, but alas I just don't care for it.

I haven't had time to read your essay yet, I was without a laptop for a couple days. I am going to read it now, but doubt that I will formulate any sort of a reply before I head off to bed. It's been a long day.

I don't know what I read recently, and by that I mean I cannot recall exactly where I read this thing, but it disclosed that one character or maybe a comedian said that if he knew that he could take only one book with him to a deserted island, he wouldn't go to the island.

That's me, brother. I go through one book in just a small slice of time. And my brain is then ready for another one!

But the purpose of the deserted island game is to get us to think about what is important to us.

That is also the purpose of Nevil Shute's 1957 novel about the inexorably fatal aftermath of an international nuclear exchange. He had to go through all kinds of contemplation to decide what his main characters would do in their final months and days. And as you read it, you wonder what you would do. All from the safety of your armchair.

But if I had to be on a desert island, I would not take the novel On the Beach with me. I know that!

The characters in the novel are, in effect, stranded on a desert island with everything they own...yet it doesn't all work the way it used to. And there is a fact of their new lives...a fact that they try their best to ignore.

Yet it is a story about people who endure two years of dread, hearing radio reports of a moving cloud of radiation. If you don't die of other means you will succumb to radiation sickness. No way out of it. Shute's characters don't moan and complain about their lot. They are British subjects, after all.

They exhibit a degree of ingenuity after they realize that the oil products all come from the Northern hemisphere. They adapt things. They make do with things. Life goes on until it can't any more.

Shute wrote his story with the spectre of nuclear disaster on a global scale hanging over everyone on the earth. Not that it's totally gone these days. We just don't hear about it all the time any longer. We don't rehearse for it the way people used to do. Instead of living day to day expecting the nuclear war to happen at any time, we go about our lives assured that it won't.

And the characters in On the Beach also know that there won't be a nuclear war. There has already been one. They didn't take part in the violence, but the result of that violence is coming after them anyhow. Every few pages we encounter a character who tries to put thoughts of what is to come out of mind. Every few pages we read a brief exchange about what is to come. Once in a while two characters will actually have a conversation about what they face.

Even in the later sections of the book as the inevitable is coming near, Shute manages to allow some humor to creep into the story, with some excellent laughs. For example, when John Osborne realizes that only one other car besides his damaged Ferrari racing car is still in his heat to qualify for the last Australian Grand Prix, he rallies with his damaged front fender and tire to cross the finish line in second place. Or Douglas Froude who feels a compulsion to finish up the thousands of bottles of wine and brandy that his men's club owns in Melbourne.

Amid its nuts and bolts examinations of the particles of life, the moments we would recognize, there are moments described that are the ironic definition of "bittersweet." They don't hang heavily, but they tug relentlessly for a few seconds as the words enter your brain and affect your emotions. It's funny that the novel has on the reader the reverse effect of the encroaching cloud of deadly radioactivity in its fictional world. That cloud is unbelievable to those who intellectually know that it is drifting toward them. They struggle to make it real, and fail. The reader knows that this book is fictional, but the characters refuse to be mere ghosts. They take on enough substance to make you care what happens to them, and that leads the non-existent to become somewhat real in your heart. Real enough to tug gently at the strings of it.

The most depressing theme of the book is that we see people doing things trying to keep normal life going right up until the end. It's natural for us to think, What's the use? as we read about them replacing fencing and repairing cars. And then it strikes us as we read: everything we do day to day is useless in the end. What's the point of any of it? Well, we can't let ourselves think that way for very long, or there might be chaos. And what's the point of chaos? That's what you get in the Zak Hilditch film These Final Hours.

So, although Shute's people seem to be unrealistic in their forging ahead, perhaps they are much more realistic than we think at first. Zak Hilditch creates a very acute endgame, while Nevil Shute makes his characters endure chronic months of knowing what is to come. The slowly moving cloud of radioactive material is creeping up on them. Death is creeping up on them. In a quaint literary sense, the symbol in the story (radioactive cloud) stands in only for the thing that it brings (death).

Veterans from WWII were called upon to recount their experiences during the 50th anniversary years in the 1990s. These included a man who recalled that when his ship was struck by a Kamikaze fighter, and it was sinking, he did not feel panic. Instead he felt a profound calm. Although he was not yet 20 years old, it was all over, the struggle of life and enduring. It was finished, and he would not have to do this any longer. And then, he and many of his fellow sailors were rescued.

Perhaps Shute understood the calm of that kind of moment, and we, caught in the perseverance, fail to recognize its authenticity simply because we don't feel it at this moment. No matter how brief, or extended, perhaps if we know that death is truly upon us, we feel calm rather than panic.

Go back using these buttons.

On the Beach (novel) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "The American government voiced a criticism of the novel's premise of a threat of extinction from nuclear war, stating that there was not, nor were there ever, enough nuclear weapons to cause human extinction."

On the Beach - Teacher’s notes LEVEL 4 penguinreaders.com. "Threat of nuclear war: In 1957, when On the Beach was published, nuclear war was at the forefront of people’s minds. The Cold War between the Eastern block and the West made the danger of war frighteningly real, as both sides gathered arms and threatened each other. "

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Hank wrote:Probably most notably, I've done this with Saving Private Ryan. The direction, performances and subject are all of interest to me... but I just don't care for it in the end. Every couple years I watch it again because I keep thinking that I've got to be remembering something wrong. So many people like it, but alas I just don't care for it.

As you know there are two films that I gave two chances and neither viewing was quite what I wanted. And in both cases my response (or lack of it) surprised me. I've written about them often enough to become a bore about it. It seems odd that we watch films and are ambivalent enough about them to try again.

Your observation is interesting, though. There must be something that you like about Saving Private Ryan, or you wouldn't keep giving it another chance. Yet, it never lives up to your expectation.

Ahem. There are other films, you know.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

When you watch a film you sometimes have to kick back and just let it unfold, without trying to discern whether it was done exactly right. This is because you might be shown something(s) between the opening corporate logos and the end of the credits that you don't like. I mean, you don't like how they are presented. Yet, on balance you might find the film worthy of your time and intellectual efforts if you just kick back. This is one of those films. Especially toward the middle it gets really WTF!!? in its choice of content. Yet that content is relevant to the rest of the film in a way that only becomes clear after you slog through it.

On the Beach tries to paint a slightly benevolent picture of those in the Land of Oz managing the last few days of life on earth. This film compresses the time scale to just 12 hours as an asteroid impact shockwave dashes out from its Atlantic Ocean ground zero to engulf the entire planet with fiery death.

And the Australians depicted by These Final Hours are not held up as persons with stiff upper lips. As all hell approaches Perth, Australia, all hell breaks loose in the small corner of the country where we take a brief journey with James, who intends to be quite a chav in his last hours. At least at first.

To think that this film attempts to be a realistic portrayal of how people would behave in such final hours is to miss the point. This is not a film that shows how it would be. It is a film that tries to get us to question how you should act if you know you're going to die. In other words, what matters in those final hours should matter in the entirety of life, right?

You are going to die. Unlike the characters in These Final Hours you don't know how long it will be. It could be before you finish reading this essay. It could be 70 years from now. I wish you the 70 years, rather than before you finish reading the essay, of course.

I write below that the film is not moralizing but is still a morality play. Some of you, when you watch, will see only that the thing is trying to get you to accept a certain way of looking at life. It isn't really. Try approaching it, then, with the perspective: that the filmmakers are only trying to stimulate you to think about what to do. But depending on your state of mind and your sense of independence, you might see it as telling you how you ought to behave. It doesn't do that any more than Greg Araki's Mysterious Skin tells you how to think about the people you see, and the things you see them doing in that film.

These Final Hours is like a Rorshach blot.

James has something clearly in mind when the final hours begin on screen. He plans to party until he dies, because it will hurt and he doesn't want to be fully aware of what is happening when the end comes. But events that he does not cause (but that seem to demand a response from him) derail him from this planned decadent final party. Sure, he has in mind to literally party until he drops. But a young girl with a need to be rescued runs across his path, and he finds himself being annoyingly driven away from his perfect pain-avoidance plan. Oh, he goes there. To the party, that is. He does. And he takes the child who is the thorn in his side along with him. But something has opened his eyes and he cannot stay the course he set for himself. In fact, he learns that he doesn't really want to.

Being derailed more or less opens his eyes, and as he looks at this moribund world around him, what he thought mattered turns out not to matter at all.

Here are some aspects of the film and whether I like them or don't care for them:

Like: Without being a moralizing play, this is a morality play. In other words, it sets up situations where alternatives abound, and either shows someone doing what appears to us to be the "wrong thing" or doing what appears to us to be a better choice. It never makes the claim that this matters to the characters. It doesn't intend to show us that the choices should matter, nor does it seek to tell us why they should matter to the characters in the story. It intends to get us to reflect on what should matter to us.

Like: The situations in which James and others find themselves in the course of the afternoon are amoral. There isn't a right or wrong thing to do, given that all humans will be dead within 12 hours. So licentiousness will get you nothing worse than being a primo goody-two-shoes for the rest of your time on earth. It sets up a situation in which what a person does literally does not matter. The end will be the same, no matter what they choose.

This is a rarity in film. And it is cool, here. Think about it, in relativistic ethical terms, you can do what you want! It won't matter! But some of the characters are nonetheless troubled by religious convictions, and to them it still does matter. The point of the film is that whether you use religion as the reason or not, the right thing is the right thing, and the circumstances don't come into play in deciding which is the best way to treat others.

Like: Even though it doesn't tip its hand in a high-school literature class kind of way, this is actually a film about what matters to you. Rose and her conviction to join her father for the end of time challenge James' decision to party until the firewall hits.

Like: There is a low rumble on the soundtrack that you can hear, especially if you have a powered subwoofer. It is quiet at first, and I have no idea when it begins. I noticed it after the party scene. It is constantly there. Finally I realized that it is the approach of the impact wavefront! What a very ingenious part of their sound design.

Like: This is one of those independent films where showing you a beautifully lit or composed shot for a few seconds is made a photographic and editing priority. I'm not certain that Bonnie Elliott's cinematography is the exact equal of Giuseppe Rotunno's photography for On the Beach. But a lot of time has passed since 1959. The same stylistic "rules" are not in play these days. Both films give you that "wow, what a great image" feeling many times as they pass by your eyes. Eliott has a good way of showing what tells the story. She produces images that an editor can use to get points across, and concisely so. And her photography is not mundane, even when she shows mundane places or events.

Like: The Cornel Wilczek soundtrack is not obtrusive, except when it is meant to be. If that doesn't make sense, watch the film and then reflect on when you noticed the music. You may find that it was only when you were approaching and at the party. The rest of the time the music is like the cinematography, grabbing your attention infrequently, but always there. The music is designed to be part of the overall sound design of this movie.

Don't Like: Now, this is just me, but I hate to think that boorishness would come out so defiantly in the final hours of human life on earth. But it might. Maybe this is a very accurate speculation on what people might do at the end. Some people, anyway. If they did, what would it matter? I just don't like seeing it. That's all. I'm stuck with a ridiculously higher view of humankind than Zak Hilditch has.Like: Or do I? After all, it is Zak Hilditch's main character who abandons his selfishness in these final hours in order to serve someone else's needs. As a writer, he must think that some people would behave that way.

Don't Like: I have to parrot a critique that I read and can't find again, where the writer questioned whether Rose would actually take the pill that she is offered. I thought she had it together better than that, too. But she's suffered the trauma of having James abandon her in the middle of a loud party with strangers, and one of the first things she has seen after entering the party is...well, it's really awful. Maybe she was disarmed and made vulnerable by the environment in which she found herself. Or maybe it's just necessary to get the plot moving along again.

Like: By the time this movie begins there is no time to try to make anything remotely normal. People have known about this for possibly years, and many have already given up, killed themselves. The ones who are left alive are either amazingly hopeful, afraid of dying but unwilling to commit suicide; but for whatever reason they are still alive, they don't have much time to think about it. And, yet, in the final hours time slows down and that half-day becomes a hell of a lot of time to think. So, people like James have planned a distraction. For the end of time.

Don't Like: The movie uses a device which you might call motivational polygyny in that James has two girlfriends. He doesn't appear to be married to either one. But one of them has a hold on him that the other does not. She represents responsibility in a high school English class literary symbolism way, while her counterpart represents a fantasy that life can be totally fun. Ms. Responsibility is bland, but Ms. Fun is annoying, shrill and self-serving. But this is not as blatant as I make it sound. Perhaps I should admire the subtlety of this device rather than disliking its cliche nature.Like: There is something that I haven't yet had time to fathom. It is possibly related to the disliked aspect listed just above. The meaning of this (if there is any) is unclear to me: almost all of James' interactions are with females. His two girlfriends, Rose, his sister and nieces, and his mother. Unless this is some subconscious invention of Zak Hilditch's mind, then it must have some significance. The child in trouble could just as easily have been a boy. And James would probably have rescued that kid, too. But Rose is not a boy. I think she is a girl for some reason, and someday I may understand what it is. It is not sex, I know that much. But the presence of these particular females is significant, I think.

There aren't many things that I dislike about the film apart from what Hilditch sets me up to dislike. There are people in the movie that are not likable. I don't believe that they randomly wandered into the story while it was being shot. In this film being unlikable is a relative thing.

This film is short, sweet and to the point. Not sweet in the emotional sense, but sweet in its directness. Honest in its depiction of approaching hell and the hell that a catastrophe might cause to blossom in the final hours of human time on earth. The entire incident is compressed. I can imagine that this could be made into a 12 hour miniseries, and play out in real time from impact to final charring wash. But thank goodness Zak Hilditch wanted to tell his story in 12.5% of that time.

This is an art film above all. The dialog is never "deep" but the words coupled with the images and sounds get the point across.

Hilditch has no doubt seen or read On the Beach. His film is very much like it in many ways. But it is its own vision, based on a different catastrophic event, and cast in the frenetic vibe of the early 21st century. He takes a similar "what if...?" question and examines it with surprising (yet not blatantly obvious) depth for the 87 minute run time.

Go back using these buttons.

These Final Hours Press Kit in pdf format. From bettapictures.com "It’s the last day on Earth, twelve hours before a cataclysmic event will end life as we know it. A troubled young man named James makes his way across a lawless and chaotic city to the party to end all parties. However, along the way he ends up saving the life of a little girl named Rose, desperately searching for her father. Stuck with the unexpected burden of responsibility, James is forced to come to terms with what really matters in life and helps Rose find her father which ultimately leads him on a path to redemption."

These Final Hours. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "The film takes place in Perth, and begins ten minutes after a meteor has collided with earth in the North Atlantic, leaving approximately twelve hours until the subsequent global firestorm reaches Western Australia."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

YouTookMyName wrote:Batman is possibly my favorite superhero. If he isn't, he doesn't lag far behind Spiderman. But before I ever saw Spiderman, there was no rival to Batman for my fan affection. For the record, Flash was in second place. I liked his ability to move with great speed. When I was a young teenager, I was unaware that Batman had ever been brought to the movie screen before the 1966 TV series.

Been watching the new series The Flash on Netflix streaming for the past 3 days.

I think I have a new favorite superhero. I know for sure now that I like the Flash better than Bats. And I like this series. I hear it only gets better as season 1 progresses, and in the second season.

Finally, a TV series seems to match the idea I had of Barry Allen when I was a kid reading the comics.

Plus, I love the humor in the series. From S1E5 Kaitlyn asks Cisco: What were you thinking? If you've seen it you know that this is not in the foreground. In the background. Not delivered in a pointed way. Most excellent. And from what I've read the season doesn't even hit its stride until later.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

As fond as audiences may be for movies that show the fictive "end of the world," they aren't as fond of movies that show the end of humankind. A bleak ending isn't uplifting, and since the world around us splashes cold water over our dreams as often as possible, paying to see a movie that just does the same thing is undesired by most.

Now, for all but a handlful of these movies EOW means the end of the world as we know it. People go on. They live drastically altered lives, but not everyone dies. Thus, there are witnesses to the destruction and the glorious struggle to persist and overcome, and these witnesses become the central characters of the story. Thus, most EOW movies are post-apocalyptic in nature rather than showing a full-blown 100% demise kind of apocalypse.

Lately, it seems, most EOW films are about zombie attacks. Viral zombies. Saliva zombies. Extraterrestrial dust zombies. They're all the same. By the way, you've got red on you.

The Mad Max series of films could potentially be set in a post-nuclear world where people are left. In fact, it could be a less radioactive version of the On the Beach Australia. In Fury Road there seem to be tumors (Nux gives his neck tumors names), perhaps from radioactivity that is sub-lethal in level, but still potent enough to cause unbridled birth defects and the like.

The first film doesn't explicitly say that a nuclear war is the cause of the aftermath we see. It could be environmental, as well (as if nuclear fallout isn't environmental--duh!). By the third film the nuclear war explanation is given, and it is explicitly stated in the fourth film. By the way, you had a baby brother that was perfect -- perfect in every way. Sadly, he was stillborn.

The Road doesn't tell us what went wrong. Nor does The Book of Eli, or any of the films of that ilk. Or maybe I just don't remember. It's been a while. But as a viewer who saw such post-apocalyptic films during the Cold War, I can attest that all the cues are there, however subtle, in the films of that era.

No one needs to say it was nuclear. After all, we thought about the possibility every. single. day. The World, the Flesh and the Devil follows a nuclear war that we don't see. Only the aftermath is on the screen. And the film leaves no question what caused the death of almost all animal life on earth.

A number of EOW films have tended toward some kind of environmental disaster, always unexplained, for decades, especially since Earth Day 1970. Around that same time the undead also became popular in EOW films.

Soylent Green famously showed an EOW scenario that seemed all too possible following Earth Day 1970. Twelve billion world population by 2022? That seemed a given. Still possible even now, but less likely. After all, there were only 2.6 billion people in the world the year I was born. Even The Omega Man wasn't totally beyond comprehension for those of us just starting adult life in the early 1970s. But it's primarily a vampire/zombie flick. The first remake of a 1957 film.

And then there is Melancholia (seen in first banner), which is the same kind of film that the two foci of this Rematch are. Kaboom. All done. Don't bother lowering the curtain. There is no stage left.

Los últimos días (The Last Days (2013)) is a Spanish film about some kind of viral plague that renders people fatally agoraphobic. Not zombies. The film is well-made, although the premise might not seem to make sense to many viewers. But remember: no zombies. That says it's just as plausible as most post-apocalyptic films, to me. Wait, what am I saying? It's a million times more plausible than all the zombie films!

You might get the idea that all these post-apocalypse films are made only to allow the production designers and set dressers to play in the mud and sling trash about. That would be fun! But sooner or later, because after you wrap at a location the real world sets in, you have to clean it up and make it look better than it did when you arrived to prep. Ugh. Clean up.

Gimme Shelter: 40 great apocalypse movies. msn.com. "Whether by zombie attacks, meteors, tidal waves, or nuclear catastrophes, Earth and its inhabitants have suffered destruction time and again at the hands of Hollywood. With a nod to the release of "Mad Max: Fury Road," embrace the end of the world by checking out these"

THE 10 GREATEST APOCALYPSE MOVIES. ShortList.com. "If the ancient Mayans are to be believed, humanity will be gasping its last on 21 December 2012. But what form will our imminent doom be taking? Nuclear war? Airborne space-virus? Unceasing plague of motorised zombie-vampires?"

The 20 Best End-of-the-World Movies. By Mark Rozeman | August 23, 2013 | 3:39pm at Paste Magazine.com. "In honor of the release of The World’s End, we decided to take a look at some of the most notable end-of-the-world films."

The 20 Best Apocalypse Movies Of All Time. Refinery29.com. Jun 24, 2015 1:30 PM by Sabrina Rojas Weiss. "And yet, every fictional depiction of our demise serves a different purpose, from warning us of the idiocy of nuclear warfare (Dr. Strangelove) and scaring the crap out of us about the consequences of genetic engineering (every modern zombie movie), to cautioning us against environmental disasters and spinning any number of silly allegories in between."

>CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959). by John Kenneth Muir, wordpress.com, Posted on April 15, 2011. "An early entry in the post-apocalyptic genre — and a contemporary of such films as Five (1951) and On The Beach (1959) — The World, The Flesh and The Devil has just been released for the first time on DVD by the Warner Archive. Directed by Ranald MacDougall, The World, the Flesh and The Devil commences with the end of the world itself." "[Ralph] is trapped in a cave-in beneath the Earth’s surface when the war occurs. After Ralph discovers a path to the surface, he learns from newspaper headlines that nuclear war has wiped out almost all animal life on the planet. He is alone."

The Road Takes Desolate Journey From Page to Screen. wired.com byHugh Hart Date of Publication: 11.24.09. 2:01 pm. "So begins the journey of the Man and the Boy, a desperate father and his son who head for the ocean after an unnamed disaster destroys human civilization."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Great essays. Also, to your point about the female interactions in These Final Hours... not sure what to think about this, but I concur that virtually all (certainly any meaningful) interactions take place with those of the opposite sex... and that it would seem to serve some purpose. But perhaps (pure speculation here) it is somewhat auto-biographical? In an interview I read, Zak states that it takes place in his home town (which he doesn't try to hide at all) and that he and his sister were raised by his mom. Perhaps this film on some level is about him.

I see. Well, there might certainly be some utility in reading biography pages on the net. Thanks.

I'm not saying that it must be made sense of. Interesting that you would see it, even if it's because I mentioned it. Your explanation is as good as any that I could define.

And I appreciate the compliment on the essays.

I feel like you're the only one on the Corrie who's still reading, but even if that's not true, you're certainly my last commenter!

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Alike Yet DifferentHow the two films are similar:1. Both take place in Australia.

2. Both take place after a catastrophic event.

3. Both feature the end of the human world.

4. Everybody dies.

5. Before they die they have to endure a period of time still alive, and knowing what is to come.

6. Something that will kill them is approaching; something that they cannot possibly stop (or hurry).

How the two films are different:1. The catastrophic events are different types. And one film is set near Melbourne while the other is in Perth.

2. The time frame for waiting is different.

3. Non-human things are left after one catastrophe, but nothing is left standing after the other.

4. Before they die On the Beach offers over a year of waiting time for Australians, and These Final Hours offers 12 hours of waiting time. Death is either by suicide or by radiation sickness in the 1959 story. The 2013 film features immediate death by incineration (oh, and suicide...and...murder).

5. One group (1959) tries to behave themselves while they wait, to be decent people to the end, and the other group (2013) rips the world a new one, because they want to partaay. We read of wild parties in On the Beach, but we only see a mild party in the film. We visit a very wild party in These Final Hours.

6. In On the Beach the approaching deadly wave is merely carried by the wind, and is undetectable to human senses (only radiation meters will detect it). The deadly radiation will cause radiation sickness, which itself will take 10-14 days to kill you by making you sick with diarrhea and vomiting. In These Final Hours the impact wavefront announces its arrival with a persistent, low rumble, and then becomes a wall of wet fire approaching across the ocean or land. You fry in seconds once it makes its incredibly high-temperature arrival.

It is hard to imagine that anyone could sustain a feeling of terror for months on end. The brain would demand a respite, whether real or imaginary. It is not difficult to imagine that panic could seize a person and hold him or her in its iron grasp for a dozen hours.

As humans we don't generally like situations where there is nothing that we can do. In fact, in the history of our literary art there are relatively few stories of this type. Instead, we favor the stories where we conquer, rise above, or stolidly endure to those where there is no possible effect that we can have on the things that are happening around us and to us! That fact alone makes these films rarities.

Some events and situations in either film might make you feel misty, but that isn't a failure of the film. Instead, it's a sign that the film has succeeded in letting you connect to the fictional characters. As they do things that are similar to what real people might do, you respond emotionally to that. It is sentimental, but it isn't sentimentality on the part of the filmmakers. It is simply that they don't shy away from showing actions people might take in similar circumstances...actions that you might take in those circumstances...and it causes within you a perfectly normal and human response.

Go back using these buttons.

List of apocalyptic films. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "This is a list of apocalyptic feature-length films. All films within this list feature either the end of the world, a prelude to such an end, and/or a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting, or a world taken over by a viral infection."

List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "Apocalyptic fiction does not portray catastrophes, or disasters, or near-disasters that do not result in apocalypse. A threat of an apocalypse does not make a piece of fiction apocalyptic."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Well, although I created the graphics and the code for the essay 1 post on my Windows machine, I posted it using my new Mac Book Pro. When I went to save the webarchive file for page 41, Safari wouldn't let me drill down to the particular subfolder where I normally save. I'm sure there is a way to specify a subfolder, but I'll have to learn how to do that.

It's been over 8 years since I've had a working Mac, and at least 5 years since I played with my friends' Mac in Memphis. Thus, I'm rusty on little things about MacOS that I used to know.

Anyhow, the 15" retina display is beautiful. And it's clear and clean. Most of the time I don't have to use my reading glasses although the text on screen is technically small!

/boasting

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

A Comparison of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)The Writers

On the Beach (1959)

Nevil Shute Norway wrote the novel from which the screenplay was adapted. On the Beach was not his only published novel, of course, but he is best known world-wide for that tale and A Town Like Alice. Shute was born in the UK, and lived the final decade of his life in Australia. According to Wikipedia: Shute used his full name in his career as an aeronautical engineer, and left off his surname when publishing his fiction works. He was among the best-selling writers in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. His popularity declined after his death in 1960.

John Paxton adapted Shute's novel for motion pictures. Between 1944 and 1977, Paxton garnered 20 screen writing credits. He also has a posthumous credit for the On the Beach TV miniseries (2000). He is known as the screen writer who adapted The Wild One (1953) (Marlon Brando's 7th film appearance just before On the Waterfront (1954)). Paxton was a co-creator of the 1977 animated series I'm the Greatest!: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali. The bulk of his career output, according to IMDb, was noir mysteries and tough crime dramas. Paxton died in 1985 when he was 73 years old. His son, Bill Paxton, is an actor.

These Final Hours (2013)

Zak Hilditch wrote the screenplay for this film, and also directed it. His first writing and directorial credit appears for Waiting for Naval Base Lilly (2003). He has 12 credits in each category as of 2015, although the correlation between the lists is not 1.00. These Final Hours is his most recent writing and directorial effort as of this post.

John Paxton. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. "He helped adapt the screenplay for the controversial movie The Wild One in 1953 starring Marlon Brando, and his adaptation of the Nevil Shute novel On the Beach appeared in 1959. Paxton's work twice received the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay, for Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Movies about the end of the world seem to hold out suicide as an "escape." In both the movies we are contemplating, characters kill themselves rather than face the inevitable end that they know to be at hand. An early out that produces the same result is not an escape, so far as I can reason. And I know that morality might change in the world of On the Beach, or Melancholia, or These Final Hours. I know that. Still...

Even if the end of the world was only hours away I'm not sure I could off myself. Oh, I've wanted to die, and I've fantasized about ways that I could end my own life. But I've never reached the point of actualization. Because I never wanted to die that badly.

So, what would it be like if another planet were about to engulf the earth? Or if there was an asteroid impact shockwave front about to reach my homeland? Or if a radioactive cloud was wending its way slowly, ever so slowly to where I lived?

If the world has been hit by an asteroid, and the shock front is approaching where you are, is it suicide to stand there and fry? I'm not sure. If there is nowhere to run is suicide senseless? Or is it sensible? Or does it even matter?

Could I do it then? Would I take the pills, or use a gun? I don't think I could even play Russian Roulette if I knew I'd be dead from asteroid heat in less than six hours. Kill myself? Even in those circumstances?

Something tells me that I could not. I'll likely never be in such a situation in order to know what I would actually do. You?

Nuclear War Survival Skills. Source of fallout image. "Myth: Fallout radiation from a nuclear war would poison the air and all parts of the environment. It would kill everyone. (This is the demoralizing message of On the Beach and many similar pseudoscientific books and articles.)" Well, you can listen to this 2004 survivalist guy if you want to. I just borrowed a picture from his website.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

A Comparison of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)Behind the Lens

On the Beach (1959)

Giuseppe Rotunno creates what seems to be a cohesive world in On the Beach. He brings the familiar into an odd angular presentation and makes the unfamiliar seem no more off-kilter than the regular world. He began shooting films with Scandal in Sorrento (1955) and concluded his career as a cinematographer with a 1997 documentary about Marcello Mastroianni. There are 77 projects between the two that bear Rotunno's visual stamp. I have seen only six of the films listed at IMDb. Among them are Fellini Satyricon (1970), All That Jazz (1979,) Popeye (1980), and Regarding Henry (1991).

These Final Hours (2013)

Bonnie Elliott has worked around cameras and film crews since 1997. Although she has earned 60 cinematographer credits, many of them for short films, she has been the lighting camera person for some features, as well. The first of these is a film entitled Intermezzo (1999). Among her credits are several documentaries, and several other features including My Tehran for Sale (2009), and These Final Hours (2013). Elliott has continued to work diligently, having shot 7 projects since 2014. Her style in These Final Hours is very much a workable blend of documentary style and art cinema.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

A Comparison of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)In the Cutting Room

On the Beach (1959)

Frederic Knudtson (1906–1964) started with a film called Lucky Devils (1933) in pre-code Hollywood. The IMDb page points out that he worked at RKO for 22 years and then at United Artists from 1957 to 1963. His 79th and last editorial project was Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). He lived only until February of the following year. Oddly enough, another film in this thread is associated with Knudtson: The Window (1949) was one of his editorial projects at RKO. This film came up in the first NQRR between Rear Window and Disturbia, and was connected to Peter Pan, either thematically or by actors involved. Knudtson edited The Defiant Ones (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), adding a touch of artistic stratosphere to his last 9 film projects. Knudtson's editing style is to be clear and inconspicuous rather than flashy, letting the audience see what is in the story, not his particular technique.

These Final Hours (2013)

Nick Meyers has been editing films since 1994, with his first feature being Square One (1997). He has worked consistently since then, shifting from fictional films to documentaries, to short films and including 10 feature films in the mix. His features include The Boys (1998), Balibo (2009), Sleeping Beauty (2011), and The Rocket (2013). He often edits 2-4 projects per year. His touch with Bonnie Elliott's footage is quite intentionally jarring at times. They both work on documentaries, so her footage handled with his documentary sense of immediateness often leaves you disoriented: are you watching reality or something made up?

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

The other four essays I have written seem redundant when taken with the reviews and the four posted essays. Perhaps there wasn't as much to say about these two movies as I thought at first. Anyway I'm slogging ahead with the tech information posts. Maybe I'll get some different ideas for essays. Maybe I can do a cast comparison if I make myself watch the 2000 TV mini-series of On the Beach. Maybe four will be all he wrote! (or posted, anyhow)

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

A Comparison of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)Soundtracks

On the Beach (1959)Ernest Gold (1921–1999) Composer. Because Gold worked with Stanley Kramer on so many films, On the Beach isn't even listed at IMDb as one of his best known works. He began a career in film composition with The Girl of the Limberlost (1945), amassed 81 total composer credits through 1988 (the Lincoln TV mini-series), and has accumulated another two credits posthumously. Between the ends of his career he scored b-movies, travelogues, and internationally acclaimed films. Sometimes he was credited on screen, and at other times his name was not on anything but the check. He won an Oscar for the music in Exodus (1960). He wrote the scores for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Fun with Dick and Jane (1967), and for many shorts films and an occasional episode of a TV series. He composed the music for Sam Peckinpah's 1977 The Cross of Iron. Even more so than directors, composers get to cross genre lines and make soundtracks for big- and small-budget films, alike! He even composed music that wasn't "good enough to use" but was good enough to release on the official soundtrack...for Used Cars (1980).

These Final Hours (2013)Cornel Wilczek Composer. This man operates out of Melbourne, Australia. He has a recording studio business, produces albums for bands, releases his own music as "Qua" (four albums so far) and he is currently scoring his fifth feature film. He also scores television films and programs for Australian television. Because he has a personal website for his business activities it is probably possible to learn more about him than we can about pre-internet Ernest Gold. Wilczek's first film was Save Your Legs (2013) followed by These Final Hours (2013), and The Mule (2013). His fourth feature film composition project was Cut Snake (2015). You can hear samples of his work on YouTube and at iTunes. The cut "These Final Minutes" is evocative and powerful as music on its own. If you hunt you can find other clips on YouTube.

Cornel Thomas Wilczek music composition & production's business website. "Cornel Wilczek is a music composer for film and TV, producer/engineer, multi instrumentalist and sound artist living in Melbourne Australia. He has composed music for 4 feature films, 2 TV shows and produced over 30 albums for Australian and overseas artists. He has released 4 critically acclaimed albums under the alias Qua on labels Headz (Japan) and Mush Records (USA) and Someone Good. (AU)" Image of Wilczek from his Tumblr account.

Demons vs Boys incidental music from the original TV series Nowhere Boys.

Used Cars Music By Patrick Williams and Ernest Gold from examiner.com. September 3, 2012. "On the other hand, Gold did bring a professional and more serious tone to the film which included arrangements of "Stars And Stripes Forever" which did stay in the film but in contrast to Williams' work his version of the finale sequence ("Let's Move Out!/More Speed") doesn't quite work as well and is a little too much Elmer Bernstein for its' own good....His 'Used Cars End Credits' do however work, but it doesn't quite work all the way with its peculiar European style."

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Suicide. I'm with you. I don't think I could ever get to the point where I could intentionally go through with killing myself. Asteroid approaching earth? What if it misses? What if I could survive? I would have to be completely emotionally and physically broken.... but then again, I guess I wouldn't know if until it happens. Currently, I have never really thought about it. This is the most I have ever contemplated it, actually.

I know this references a post from long ago, but I haven't been around for awhile.

Hank wrote:Suicide. I'm with you. I don't think I could ever get to the point where I could intentionally go through with killing myself. Asteroid approaching earth? What if it misses? What if I could survive? I would have to be completely emotionally and physically broken.... but then again, I guess I wouldn't know if until it happens. Currently, I have never really thought about it. This is the most I have ever contemplated it, actually.

I know this references a post from long ago, but I haven't been around for awhile.

Those kids and your lovely wife give you several reasons to not bother contemplating suicide.

Also, your art.

Also the kids at school.

Anyway, I've been so busy the last two weeks that I haven't had time to work up any more tech posts. Still spinning my wheels on potential essays. One I tried and got all excited about has led to a dead end in terms of finding supporting material--at least on the net.

And I'm actually working on some material for the Battle Royale/Hunger Games NQRR, which I don't even have any date in mind for! So that's weird.

Been doing a lot of English tutoring and scientific paper writing the last 10 days. Oh, and there was Thanksgiving.

/excuses

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

Spent a couple hours this morning writing a rant about guns and the use of them and the coverage of the use of them and the NRA.

You didn't really think I was going to post it, did you?

Then I decided I should post something on this Rematch.

So I worked a few hours getting research and writing done, then finding posters and so forth.

It's finally done. You should be able to find it below.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN

A Comparison of On the Beach (1959) and These Final Hours (2013)Design

On the Beach (1959)Rudolph Sternad (1906–1963) Production Designer. Fernando Carrere (1910–1998) Art Director. Joe King (1908–2002) Wardrobe. These three people had to design sets, props and costumes that had color in the real world, but for a world that would be seen by viewers only in shades of gray.

Rudolph Sternad according to his IMDb bio page "worked with Cary Odell on most of Columbia's prestige films between 1940 and 1953. Sternad subsequently went free-lance, working for independent filmmaker Stanley Kramer." For this reason, many of Sternad's highest profile film work was on the same titles we have been seeing for other On the Beach collaborators. In 1936 Sternad worked on three films as associate art director, or production designer. He worked as production designer on Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), Death of a Salesman (1951), and High Noon (1952), so his Columbia connection brought him quite a lot of notice. I also remember his work on The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), where Hans Conried plays an out of control Dr. Terwilliker, a piano teacher who wants to have 500 boys playing a single enormous piano at once. A Dr. Seuss story. Weird. And cool, too. Of course, it all turns out to be a dream. In the banner above, Sternad is looking over a sketch of the piano with Dr. Seuss. Between 1937 and 1951 Sternad also earned 37 screen credits as art director.

Fernando Carrere was born in Mexico City, Mexico, but died in Los Angeles, CA. Between those events he had a career in Hollywood film production design that lasted from 1955 to 1980. IMDb shows 14 credits as Art Director, and another 14 credits as Production Designer. New York Confidential (1955) kicked off his Hollywood run. He then worked on 27 other films, including The Children's Hour (1961), The Pink Panther (1963), The Great Race (1965), The Party (1968), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Convoy (1978) and his final film, The Final Countdown (1980). I have seen a good number of these films, and others which had the Carrere touch.

Joe King was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, before the Soviet Union! and died in Los Angeles 93 years later. His film career spanned the years from 1944 to 1967. IMDb says he often worked with Stanley Kramer, so many of his film credits correspond with the people who worked on On the Beach (1959). He has only 5 credits as costume designer, but among them is Judgment at Nurmeberg (1961). He worked on 38 films as wardrober. His first screen credit was for the men's wardrobe in Champion (1949), Over the years he was involved with rather high-profile cinema, including Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), The San Francisco Story (1952), High Noon (1952), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), The Defiant Ones (1958), Exodus (1960) and his final film as costume designer, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

Nigel Devenport has worked on 13 short and feature films since 1997, when he was set dresser on Under the Lighthouse Dancing (1997). He has three Production Designer credits: Crush (2009), Needle (2010) and These Final Hours (2013). Devenport actually has more credits as assistant or second unit director.

Monique Wajon worked with Devenport on Needle (2009). She has 8 credits as production designer, on five short films and three features. Her film credits are all between 2009 and 2014 at this point. But she will get more work, because the picture of her is from her linkedin page. For the feature film Sororal (2014) Wajon was both production designer and costume designer.

Marcia Ball took on the difficult job of designing costumes for a color film that is supposed to take place in the very near future. Clothing will not have changed. Plus, when costumes are considered for a color production they not only have to evoke the desired ambience for each character, the colors of the costumes must "artistically" meld with or conflict with the colors of all other things surrounding the costumes. The costumer also must include the desires of the director: should the costumes be obvious, sublime, seductive, almost unnoticeable, run of the mill? Besides working on These Final Hours (2013) she has also designed costumes for Henry & Aaron's ABC2 Christmas Special (an 8 minute short from 2013) and Henry & Aaron's 7 Steps to Superstardom (a TV series of 6 minute shorts) (2011). I could find no photos of "Marcia Ball" that were certifiably of this Marcia Ball.

Gort/YTMN left the forum due to trolling on August 25, 2018.
I had fun. Thanks for reading!

"The wealthy and powerful always remind us that cream rises to the top.
What they fail to acknowledge is that pond scum also rises to the top.
And there is a lot more pond scum in the world than there is cream.
If you become rich and powerful, I hope that you will be cream rather than pond scum." --YTMN